the theatre, three
months before, events had crowded thick and fast in his life. The
first sensation of a great public success is strange to one who has
long been accustomed to live unnoticed and unhonoured by the world. It
is at first incomprehensible that one should have suddenly grown to be
an object of interest and curiosity to one's fellow-creatures, after
having been so long a looker-on. At first a man does not realise that
the thing he has laboured over, and studied, and worked on, can be
actually anything remarkable. The production of the every-day task has
long grown a habit, and the details which the artist grows to admire
and love so earnestly have each brought with them their own reward.
Every difficulty vanquished, every image of beauty embodied, every new
facility of skill acquired, has been in itself a real and enduring
satisfaction for its own sake, and for the sake of its fitness to the
whole,--the beautiful perfect whole he has conceived.

But he must necessarily forget, if he loves his work, that those who
come after, and are to see the expression of his thought, or hear the
mastery of his song, see or hear it all at once; so that the
assemblage of the lesser beauties, over each of which the artist has
had great joy, must produce a suddenly multiplied impression upon the
understanding of the outside world, which sees first the embodiment of
the thought, and has then the after-pleasure of appreciating the
details. The hearer is thrilled with a sense of impassioned beauty,
which the singer may perhaps feel when he first conceives the
interpretation of the printed notes, but which goes over farther from
him as he strives to approach it and realise it; and so his admiration
for his own song is lost in dissatisfaction with the failings which
others have not time to see.

Before he is aware of the change, a singer has become famous, and all
men are striving for a sight of him, or a hearing. There are few like
Nino, whose head was not turned at all by the flattery and the praise,
being occupied with other things. As he sat by the roadside, he
thought of the many nights when the house rang with cheers and cries
and all manner of applause; and he remembered how, each time he looked
his audience in the face, he had searched for the one face of all
faces that he cared to see, and had searched in vain.

He seemed now to understand that it was his honest-hearted love for
the fair northern girl that had protect